4.2 Hunter Raid Gear

You’ll undoubtedly see lots of Best-in-Slot lists around and listings of which boss drops what but I find mapping the drops into a table as below works best for me.

I’ve only included raid ilv gear (ilv 378) with the exception of Ragnaros loot, which is a tad higher (384). These are “normal” difficulty drops, the “heroic” all drops from the same place, so you can still use the table above.

Bosses

Lord Rhyolith looks to be a Hunter loot pinata in the Firelands. I’ve not had a proper try at him yet (will do on thurs) but as he can drop 3 hunter items, the chances are good.

The best 2 bosses are Majordomo Staghelm and Ragnaros. Each can drop 4 hunter items and Majordomo drops the tier shoulders and Ragnaros the tier Helm – similar to Cho’gal and Nefarian, these are the only places you can get these and will need at least one if you want that 4 set bonus

Lets not forget the trash either – probably the easiest way to get a ranged weapon, 2H Polearm and Wrists (which are all BoE) – if you’re lucky/rich enough.

Ranged Weapon.

The Best in Slot here will be Arathar, the eye of flame, which drops from Ragnaros. With a higher iLv than the other drops, it’s a clear winner but it probably the most difficult to get. It is also superior to the lower-level Conquest Point ranged weapon you can get, so if you can manage Ragnaros, there’s no point in farming for conquest just for a weapon to use in PvE.

Lord Rhyolith’s Crossbow offers Crit/Mastery while the trash drop crossbow offers Crit/Haste, which puts it in 2nd place (depending on your haste levels)

It’s questionable whether it’s worth buying the BoE crossbow from the auction house as it’s not best-in-slot but it is 2nd best and if you’re unlikely to kill Ragnaros it might not be a bad investment.

2H weapon

It’s a fact that 2H weapons are better for hunters than 2x 1H and similarly to the ranged weapon situation, the trash drop 2H polearm is Crit/Haste while the Majordomo Staff is Crit/Mastery.

This means if you can get/afford the BoE staff from the AH, it is worth buying as it’s best-in-slot.

Helm

The Tier helm is superior to the one Shannox drop but as Shannox is the first boss, it’s not a bad stop gap at all. As the tier helm drops from Ragnaros, it might be some time until you can get it anyway (I still don’t have the one from Nefarian).

Neck

The best neck is the higher iLv one which drops from Ragnaros but it offers haste/mastery – no crit, so you’ll be wanting to reforge this one. The alternative is fairly easy to get hold of, at a cost of 1,250 Valour points, so I expect to see a lot of us walking around with these for the next few months!

Shoulders

This is an one of the 2 slots I have which is less than 359 (it’s a ZA/ZG 353) so an upgrade here would be lovely! Unfortunately it is also one of the hardest slots to get this tier. The problem is that there is only 1 set of shoulders that drop and they are the tier ones from Majordomo. This doesn’t give us much choice over shoulders, so I would expect us to be in our 353/359s for some time yet!

Chest

We’ll want to be getting that 4 set bonus and given how relatively hard it is to get the chest/helm, we should be buying the tier chest/legs/hands (or by getting lucky in Baradin Hold). The Chest doesn’t drop in Baradin hold so I would recommend buying this with 2200 valour points first.

The alternative is from Lord Rhyolith, which offers hit/crit, so isn’t a terrible option if you’re short on Valour or prefer to upgrade another slot with valour instead.

Wrists

Not very exciting here, it’s either a BoE Trash drop or a 1250 BoE Valour point purchase. The Trash Drop is Hit/Haste while the VP item is Crit/Mastery, so I guess it partly depends on if you need the hit.

Both are BoE so could appear on the AH to buy with gold, or if you’re cunning you could farm the VP on an alt and give it to your hunter 😉 There wasn’t many wrist options in the 4.0 raids, so all options will be a nice upgrade if you have a 353 item like me!

Hands

As with the chest I would recommend the tier hands. These are available with a Valour Point Purchase (1650 VPs) but the 2 alternatives that could be worth considering while you’re gearing up are the LW Crafted ones (Crit/Mastery) or the gloves from Majordomo (Haste/Mastery). Don’t spend too much on the crafted ones as the VP item is superior!

Rings

Not too many options here, 2 slots, 3 rings.The best available is the one from Avengers of Hyjal Rep. You’ll need to be exhalted but it will offer you an iLv 391 ring!

The other two are either a 1250 VP purchase (Crit/Mastery) or a drop from Beth’tilac.(Haste/Mastery). The better of the two, after reforging some mastery, will depend on your haste levels. I’m edging for the VP ring.

Legs

You’ll want the tier item here (2200 VPs or BH drop), the alternative being a drop from Alysrazor.

Belt

Only 1 option here and it costs gold, so it’s an easy one! You’ll just need to be honoured with the Avengers of Hyjal to buy this Haste/Mastery belt.

Feet

2 options here, the BoE LW feet (Crit/Mastery) or a drop from Baleroc (Hit/Crit). Depending on if you need the hit, one will be better than the other, so out of the 2 LW purchases available to us, I would say this is a better purchase.

Cloak

First of all you should get the free iLv 365 cloak from completing the Thrall Q line (which you probably have already done). Beyond that there is a drop from Lord Rhyolith (Hit/mastery) or a Rep purchase (hit/crit) once friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. At first glance the rep reward sounds better but the Boss drop has 2 red sockets (compared to 0 on the rep reward) and an +20 Agi socket bonus, so I would imagine this would be superior for most of us with 2 fat red gems in it.

Still, the alternative is just a gold purchase so a good stop gap 🙂

Trinkets

There is a very good post on the WHU about trinkets, so I would direct you there.

Essentially there are 4 (i’m including a new iLv365 here), 2 from vendors, 2 from bosses to pick between. It sounds like the best option will be to get the easier vendor items first: Rickets Magnetic Fireball & Ancient Petrified Seed until you get lucky enough to get a Majordomo or Ragnaros drop!

Final Tips!

• As with everything, any drop you get, make sure you run it through www.femaledwarf.com and apply some common sense before blindly equipping it. Some items I might have mentioned as superior for me may not be for you, given any difference in spec or gear.
• For Valour Points I would recommend buying the tier gear first – starting with the chest just in case you get lucky in Baradin Hold (I’ve got nothing from there yet QQ).
• In terms of BoE purchases, I would consider buying the Crossbow (would rather farm conquest points for 5 weeks), I would recommend buying the Polearm, pass on the wrists (especially if you have an alt), pass on the LW hands and buy the LW feet. If you’re filthy rich you could just buy it all and give yourself a nice head start!

Hopefully you’ll find this of some use, I know researching the info has enlightened me a little.

On a side note, we killed Beth’tilac on Sunday (no loot QQ) so expect my next post to be an update on the encounter!

And as always, have a nice day! (Qudos to anyone who gets that quote)

 

“It’s a right PvP mess up, your honour!”

Oh deary me. I’m not sure if you missed it but Blizzard have let the ball drop with the switching of PvP seasons and gear.

Previously

Blizzard had stated that when a new patch is released, the current Valour/Conquest gear will become available for Justice/Honour points and a new level of gear will be introduced.

This works well as it means if you’re a raider/PvP person, you won’t need to farm every slot again, you can just use your Justice Points/Honour to fill any gaps you have and focus on the new tier of gear.

This is a sweet deal.

What actually happened

The new patch dropped, both Valour/Conquest items went down to Justice/Honour level and lots of people went and bought up their items as expected. However, Blizzard were about to take a turn for the worst..they introduced a new honour level of gear (iLv 371) superior to the gear people had just bought for honour (iLv 365) – so anyone who had spent their honour innocently on the iLv365 honour gear just got screwed!

I was one of these people. I had about 5000 honour from the 4.2 conversion and used it all on honour gear and then converted all my JP into honour and used all that on gear too…so probably around 8000 on honour overall, quite a bit!

Admitting Fault

To be fair on Blizzard, they did admit fault with this (see link below). I have no idea how something like this got through the net though as it is bleedingly obviously wrong!

You can see the blue post here.

A resolution

Within 2 weeks Blizzard should reimburse anyone negatively impacted by this change with 4000 honour points.

My recommendation

The 4000 points isn’t enough to compensate my 8000 spent but you could argue it means I can use those points to upgrade bits of gear I did previously had, so it’s not that bad at all.

However, how are they going to do this? How can they tell if you are applicable for the 4000 honour? One suggestion going around is to just upgrade everyone’s S9 honour gear to S10. I again have no problem with this, although the 4000 honour would be better.

My personal suggestion would be to get rid of the S10 honour gear (and downgrade anyone who has some to S9 honour). Why? Because then we won’t need to farm for honour every season! This would mirror the PvE (superior) side of things.

Imagine if they did the same to PvE. We would have a new tier (iLv365?) available for Justice Points that would be superior to our raid gear…so we’d all be out farming heroics like crazy to improve our performance, even though there is a new raid available. It would be nonsense!

So in conclusion, it would seem that Blizzard want us to farm for honour every season; Why else would they put a new iLv of honour gear in every season? I think it’s a 2 part answer:

1) They don’t want everyone just sticking to Arena in S10, as the BG experience will be very quiet and frustrating for people experiencing long queue times.

2) With people getting conquest points from Arena, Rated BGs will continue to be a big fail (in terms of popularity). This change will force people into both Rated and Unrated BGs as both can provide honour.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this isn’t the best way to improve BGs popularity, they should take a step back and make BGs and PvP more fun.

 

Firelands Raid first impressions & Hunting Shannox

So far we’ve spent 1 Sunday and 1 Thursday in the Firelands raid and have successfully killed the 1st boss, Shannox, twice. Before I go into that, lets talk about the new raid instance.

The Firelands is an outdoor raid (you can mount up), which is at the south of Mount Hyjal and features Ragnaros as the end boss. The area inside actually looks pretty cool, if you’ve been to the new daily Molten Front area, you’ll be quite familiar with the theme.

One thing that immediately stands out is the amount of Mobs. There are a LOT. They don’t pose too much of a challenge though, other than a time sink. In most new raids we usually wipe more times on the trash than the first bosses but in this case I don’t think we’ve wiped even once yet. The only thing to be wary of is pulling more than 1 pack – an increased risk with the level of mobs around.

With this in mind, make sure you have MD up on a Rogue so you can blame any pulls on him! Stupid Rogues.

When you kill enough Mobs the first boss, Shannox is summoned….

Boss 1: Shannox

Shannox is a weird firey naga hunter that comes along with 2 dogs as pets. Unlike us pro hunters, he can trap his own pets! What a noob! He does shout out our MM “Go for the Throat” talent though, which is a bit cooler than us.

I’m still working on perfecting the strategy but I can safely say this isn’t a good hunter fight. Lots of movement and targets getting into/out of your deadzone and in/out of your range. I suspect this might be a better fight for SV over MM as DoTs would help out a lot. This is backed up by the top 10 classes on this boss being Locks, S.Priests or a Boomkin.

Phase 1: Kill Rageface

Rageface, one of Shannox’s pets, is your first target, who you’ll nuke until he dies. Simples?

Things to bear in mind:

• Blow your CDs here if you’re not being “Face Raged”
• Don’t stand in traps (they arm after 2 seconds of landing)
• Don’t stand in the rings of fire (you can stand between the rings)
• Stand away from everyone else as this will reduce your DPS downtime through targets running into/out of your deadzone.
• Try and time your movements to when you’re not shooting steady shot (try to keep in range of the target and healer at all times). You’ll probably want to move all the time this happens to maximise your coverage.
• When the dog runs into a trap, don’t stand there thinking “Hmm, i’m lagging, my shot’s aren’t working” – which I have done a few times – quickly switch targets to the iceblock to break it.
• When targeted with “Face Rage”, feign death or deterrence. The dog will stick to you until someone hits it with a 30k+ crit. Again, more DPS down time as he is in your deadzone.

Once dead, you’ll move over to dog 2…

Phase 2: Kill Riplimb

Same as before but he won’t “Face Rage”. He will however move around a lot, quite annoyingly, so make sure you’ve kept your distance from everyone else (but in healer range). If Rapid Fire comes back up, save it for P3.

The key to Phase 2 is that Riplimb needs to die when Shannox is at 35% so be prepared to target switch.

Phase 3: Kill Shannox

He will be on 35% and you want to be close to the other DPS so you can benefit from some AoE healing but don’t get in too close as the tanks have a tendency to move the boss around and you don’t want deadzone issues.

You’ll want to use your CDs here but try and use them as soon as heroism ends (if you have it) as it’s likely to be used at the start of P3. I believe there is a greater benefit to not stack these two haste buffs.

As in the previous phases, don’t stand in stuff and it should be job done!

Loot

While Shannox is a hunter, he drops mainly plate, which makes me wonder what he’s up to. He drop a hunter helm, the Scalp of the Bandit Prince. It’s probably best to ignore the socket bonus on this and to reforge the mastery off but for most of us (myself included) it will be a nice upgrade.

He does drop 2 AGI daggers (2? WTF!) but we benefit more from an AGI 2 hander so it’s best to pass on this if someone else needs it. We’ll get our weapon some other time!

So far we’ve done this boss on both visits to Firelands and no helm for me yet 😦

Next up is Beth’tilac, so stay tuned!

 

Once more into the fire!

Well 4.2 is here and there’s lots of new stuff to do!

Over at the Warcraft Hunters Union, they have a nice post on all the hunter changes in 4.2. You can read it here: http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2011/06/hunter-patch-4-2-changes-roundup/

The main ones that stand out are these:

• Marksman Nerf – An approx 5% nerf, this is through a reduction on the careful aim talent, boosting crit when the target 90%+ HP (used to be 80%+).
• Superior Set Bonuses – Our new set bonuses are far superior to T11, so there will probably be no “2T9 2T10” like we had in ICC.
• More Pets – 10 additional “rare” pets are available, each with a unique way of taming it. These are optional though as they provide no DPS benefit.
• New pet stance – you can now have the pet on “assist” so they will only attack things that you directly attack (This will pretty much be our default stance).
• CC no longer pulls aggro – remember how when a Rogue Saps, he doesn’t pull but when we trap we do pull? This will happen no longer! It will make CC much easier to use but will completely de-skill it for PvE (Scatter + Trap Launcher + Trap is still the most difficult to pull off in PvP).

We’re hopefully hitting the new Firelands raid on Sunday, so stay tuned for some first impressions!

Glastonbury Festival

I mentioned it in my last post, but over the last weekend I went to Glastonbury Festival and it’s absolutely amazing! I can’t recommend it highly enough, if you’re able to get to the UK (or if you’re already here) and you like festivals, you must give this a go!

I think this sign I saw on the first day was a pretty big hint I was going to love the festival 🙂

 

I spoke too soon! (4.2 hunter update)

One of the dangers of commenting on data-mined patch notes is that they can be incomplete.

Fresh from MMO-Champion are some more patch notes, which still include the careful aim nerf but also includes a buff to Marksman’s mastery. There’s also a buff to Survival Hunters as Black Arrows gets a bit of a buff (as it was overly nerfed before).

So what does this mean? It means Marksmen Hunters will benefit more from Mastery (often our worst secondary stat) than we currently do. I’m not sure how this compares to the nerf to Careful Aim but hopefully it’ll work out at least the same as where we are today. I guess if the buff balances out the nerf, then you could argue it’s better as it will be more useful against things that don’t spend a lot of time over 80%.

*Update* According to WHU this is just an update to the tooltip to a mastery change made in 4.0.6, so unfortunately that means there is no buff to offset MM’s nerf on Careful Aim.

SV got a big nerf to Explosive Shot and Black Arrow a few months ago, this should go some way to fixing that but again, will have to wait and see.

One thing is for sure, the new tier bonuses are a lot better in T12 than T11, so we could see a nice little benefit there too (for those than can get it!)

NN……………….hic!

 

Of Horses and (marks)Men

Last weekend was the Epsom Derby, a day of horse racing, gambling and potentially wearing silly hats. I went down with some friends and it was a good day out. What has this got to do with WoW I hear you ask? Well friends, I was down on the betting coming up to the last race of the day when I saw a horse with odds long enough to take me back into the black for the day called “Blizzard Blues“!

Obviously I had to put some money on the biggest nerd horse of the day, I went “each way” so as long as it came in the top 3 i’d get some money back. It didn’t though. Clearly this is something they should have balanced before hand and it needs a buff! Until that day happens, the horse below will remain my favourite, amazing horse.

Patch 4.2 notes

Not the best news for us unfortunately, it’s a nerf.

This nerf affects all hunter specs that have picked up the “Careful aim” talent in the MM tree but obviously it’s a bigger nerf to MM hunters. When a target was >80% HP our Steady, Cobra and Aimed would get +60% crit. Now it’s only going to be from >90%, so 1/2 as effective. This impact will reduce the damage from the shots (between 80-90%) and also will impact our Piercing Shot bleed

I’m not sure why we’ve got a nerf really, if you look at www.stateofdps.com we’re not exactly miles ahead and fight-by-fight it we just seem to be relatively well balanced, not topping many but equally not being terrible at any, so it seems a bit out of the blue. It’s coming in 4.2, which makes me think (read: hope) that it’s because we scale a bit too well with the newer weapons – and the main beneficiary of this out of the hunter trees would be marksman.

If this is true, then it’s fair enough (I’ll have to assume it is for now) but as usual these days, I don’t think it’s being applied in the best way. To fix a scaling issue, you should adjust some levers that effect the “variable” part of the damage and potentially increase the “constant” so previous tiers are relatively unaffected but the scaling is reduced. This change seems like a knee-jerk reaction and isn’t going to improve things in 4.3 and going forward..

It’s not all bad news though, we get more pets in 4.2! (that was meant to sound 25% sarcastic). I wonder what the unique challenge will be, I hope it’s not just a rare spawn or some that requires immense luck/time.